Mordecai Kaplan and Group Preservation

This article, taken from Mel Scult's Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century, is the first of three contributions in a section on "Jewish Individualism and Collective Identity." It presents the opinions of the late Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the Reconstructionist Movement, demonstrating that Kaplan held highly the value of the Jewish collective identity, even at the expense of individualism. Included with this article is the editor's introduction to the entire section.